Deth

I know it’s not exactly new anymore but I thought I’d post my thoughts on it. I picked one up last August after my old Magellan Meridian Color was wearing out. After falling on some rocks near the Appalachian trail on NJ in a down pour the screen fogged up. I figured it was time for a new one. Molly needed a GPS because her etrex legend was falling apart and I decided it would be easier if we had the same ones. When I first picked up the [60csx][1] it felt to me like it was built well and wouldn’t break easily.

We are both very happy with the pair 60csx units we have. They get a lock pretty quick. They even get a satellite lock in the house most of the time. As a matter of fact I have 31 foot accuracy right now as I’m sitting here in the house typing this. I’ve been impressed how it’s kept a good accuracy even where my old Magellan lost sats. The Sirf Star III chip seems to have great reception It’s almost always led us right to the cache of course that depends on the hider’s coordinates.

What made me want this GPS was the screen. For me it was very readable and bright. I can use the light text on a dark background theme which is what I normally use. I can just see it better. All of the screens are easy for me to see in this setting. You can even have the map screen use this contrast. I don’t know why more gadgets don’t offer this option.

On my old Magellan I noticed quite a bit of lag while waiting for the map screen to draw or switching screens. That doesn’t seem to happen at all on the 60csx. The only lag I notice is on the altimeter screen and that is just for a second or two.

The expandable memory was very important to me and is what stopped me from really considering the 60cs for myself. That may not be where the park entrance is. With the 1GB card we are able to fit everything from City Navigator 8 and the Topo software east of the Mississippi on one card.

We have both City Navigator 8 and Topo maps installed on our GPS. The auto routing has been excellent. It has been perfect for us as long as we had reasonable expectations. What I mean is that it’s only going to get you as close as possible by road. The auto routing has cut down on the planning of where we’d like to cache. When I did all the routing at home nothing would go according to plans so it was just a big waste of paper.

My only problems with it are if you drop it the micro SD card can become loose but if that’s all that happens when it gets dropped I’ll be happy. The other thing was the unit would reboot on the altimeter screen once in a while. That hasn’t seemed to happen since the released newer firmware.